So your biggest motive to not bother developing a vaccine, from the companies' point of view, is that someone else is going to do it first?
Okay, from everybody else's point of view, What's the downside here? If some people don't think they can win the race, that means there's a race. And a race has a winner.
And it doesn't even have to stop at one winner. If the winner of that race is charging too much, it may be cheaper for some nation or even some large corporation to develop it for themselves.
And finally, none of these are processes that are going to get more expensive as tech continues to advance. Costs of production tend to come down, not go up. We spent a decade and billions of dollars on the Human Genome Project, and it was worth it. But we can have our own genomes seqenced for a dozen bucks now.
The question, at this point, is not how hard or how expensive it is to actually do it; the expense now is testing, certification, and grift. Two of these are necessary and subject to continuing improvement. The third is not.
Okay, from everybody else's point of view, What's the downside here? If some people don't think they can win the race, that means there's a race. And a race has a winner.
And it doesn't even have to stop at one winner. If the winner of that race is charging too much, it may be cheaper for some nation or even some large corporation to develop it for themselves.
And finally, none of these are processes that are going to get more expensive as tech continues to advance. Costs of production tend to come down, not go up. We spent a decade and billions of dollars on the Human Genome Project, and it was worth it. But we can have our own genomes seqenced for a dozen bucks now.
The question, at this point, is not how hard or how expensive it is to actually do it; the expense now is testing, certification, and grift. Two of these are necessary and subject to continuing improvement. The third is not.